#269 TFT 3.5" Touch Screen & ESP32 built in - Elecrow review

and welcome back now today I'm going to be looking at two boards one from Ellie Crow this one here which is not just a screen as you might think there it is in fact a fully fledged board yeah with an esp32 talking of esp32s if you remember in my last video I mentioned I designed a very simple esp32 sort of Dev board sensor board call it what you like and yeah we'll have a quick chat about that as well the two just happened to coincide Ellie Crow asked me to have a look at this and to tell you guys about it so they've supplied this for me this was my homework and the board was done by PCB way but I paid for the board myself yeah I know unusual isn't it just to get things moving along so let's have a look at both those and see what we can find I want to give a big shout out to PCB way PCB Pro Shop the easy way now we're all well aware of the five dollars for 10 pieces PCB but I've got some real practical examples that I've ordered recently let's have a look at those so here we have a very small double-sided panelized board that enables me to create a tiny little display unit look at that how cool is that and at the other end look at this Pond controller Mains voltage absolutely wonderful that looks pretty cool too doesn't it and that's been running for some time now yep PCB way has excellence in their PCB department but that's not all they do look at this is look at their products and capabilities apart from printed circuit boards of all types they do PCB assembly double-sided through a hole surface mount you name it which means you can design a prototype for yourself or your company and have it assembled by PCB way for the cost of the shipping and if you want some 3D printing done these are the people to do it for you as well PCB way we'll need to try them out now okay first things first then let's have a look at this board here as I say um Ellie Crow sent me this board because they said we've seen previous videos where you've used these sort of screens and sounds like a good fit for your channel and yes I agree in fact if you remember my web radio that's actually up there on the shelf and it's playing at its very minute although I've turned down the volume of course we don't want to copyright infringements here um it's it's still working and running fine this particular board actually has a slightly different variant of the screen that I used um it's still an ili um but this it's basically a 3.5 inch HMI display 320 by 480 so it's not bad and you can get these in all sorts of different sizes from elecrow and not necessarily with this on the back you can of course just get the screens themselves so I'm going to plug that in and because they've got a demo program on it well I wanted to show you first before I zap it with one of my own so let's do that and see what happens there we are it's running this is I guess this is um elecro's own little demo program just to show you what it can do oh there you are look I've suddenly changed my name um now this does come with one of those little stencil things styluses I should say which I do have somewhere so let me find that well I can't find it so we're going to use my Chinese Chopstick thing instead now this is just a demo program to show you sort of the abilities of what this this screen can do I suppose really although in some ways it's more what the app is doing isn't it so is try and emulate at the moment a web page which I've got to be honest doesn't work that well because it's slime refreshing as you can see here it sort of ripples up I mean this isn't a Raspberry Pi or the proper you know screen on it but it I guess it works well enough I think it works better this sort of screen as per my web radio so just to explain what I mean about paging and stop making things look like a Raspberry Pi when they are not really capable of doing it this is my web radio and the 3D case that I didn't design nor print but some kind user sent it to me so this is um if we go to the channel list for example on here and I'm on page five I can tap this one here look and it just goes back real quick and it's building these up from all the list of URLs I have and I think it works a lot better that way than trying to sort of scroll a big list up as though it were a paging or scrolling web page that's that's all I'm saying really if you want a Raspberry Pi use the Raspberry Pi and proper web page if you want an esp32 well do it this way just a suggestion really that's all is when it just flips to another page so if I click on the analytics here for example they are that's wizard across shop yeah I mean it's it's probably a better use of it rather than this scrolling although it's a bit like a talking dog isn't it it's not that uh the dog talks badly that he talks at all is the amazing thing and the fact we can actually scroll this up and down at all is a testament to the library they're using which is the lvgl it's an open source Library it's a light and versatile Graphics Library we'll talk about that in just a minute okay let's just have a quick look at this board then um not necessarily the screen itself I mean that's the standard sort of LCD TFT screen isn't it quite nice as I say I've used one in my web radio one if you've got two three years now and it's worked well fine let's look at the back though now on the back here and I'll try and put it around the right way actually there we are so that's what you have on the back so you've got an esp32 module here this is a W room one not the rovo slightly disappointing for me that you can't have the Rover version because the Rover has extra PS Ram which is what I use on my web radio it's just basically more storage for things like you know circular buffers which I use it for or potentially web pages you can load them up off the SD card which this also has of course load them up from here into extra memory and it's much much quicker than trying to read it off the SD card how about that said it's still you know an S2 processor here dual core and all the rest of it nothing nothing different about that and this also exposes various bits of the infrastructure if you like so you've got uart I squared c gpio d it says there so that's right well various i o pins you can see there um this has got a USBC interface here for standard debugging if you like or serial output plus power although you can also plug in a battery here and I'm assuming I haven't actually tested that bit out of it that the battery um is automatically charged up by this I've got to assume that but there's so much documentation I'm not kidding if if nothing else elecrow ought to be applauded for the amount of information they have on well not just this board their entire gamut of offerings it's huge and if you're interested in doing anything either just with the screens themselves or with this board in particular you really really got to read that documentation is just huge and comprehensive and markless okay there's also a socket here for speaker which I did in fact query with them because I'm I'm sort of halfway through playing about with i2s um on a different project if you remember I was well no let's let's not talk about that now but anyway I was on a project for the i2s and I said hang on how can this run directly from here without any kind of intervening chip and they said well it uses the inbuilt facility of the chip so you're talking 8-bit sound which is um um yeah okay um maybe we'll look at this aspect in a future video when I do the i2s version but myself it's a bit slow going at the moment other things on by the by the way what yeah if if you're thinking what is that noise Ralph what are you doing unfortunately I've got my 3D printer running there's no getting around it because it's a long print you know a couple of hours I've got to get the thing running so if you do hear sort of whining motor types of noises it's because that's running so let's just ignore that I'll talk about more about 3D printing in this video if we got time but let's carry on with this anyway so we got all these various sockets that do various bits and pieces yeah boot reset and all that um fine and we have the demo program on here now it's upside down of course but let's let's just put one of their test programs or their example programs on it using the Arduino IDE just just to prove it works and if if one works they all work and we'll be using the lvgl open source Library yeah which is probably the the most well well thought of Library although is different to the one that I used on my web radio which I'll also mention right so this is the code it's it's all pretty small as I say it's all written by Ellie Crowe I guess there's only a few lines setting up the pin modes and whatever and then filling up something on the screen so the only reason I'm doing this is to make sure it does upload to that board properly and runs so let's um do it this is a one-way operation as much that the demo program now on that screen esp32 combo is now going to be Zapped which is why I haven't done it ahead of time because I couldn't show you that initial demo right okay let's um let's upload this then I'm on com3 it says so well let's have a look okay I've uploaded a sketch that hands up okay it's not the same sketch as what was on the screen a minute ago because that sketch use the lvgl library this lightweight library that um Ellie Crow are sort of promoting I suppose really but um the examples they gave I don't think they were for esp32s there was something else maybe it's a Raspberry Pi or something but whatever it wouldn't even compile so I found some of the sketches that they that do compile and um okay I'm gonna load one up now and this uses the same Graphics Library I think it uses the underlying Ada for graphics library but the one that I'm actually using is called TFT underscore e SPI from bodmar um very well known as I've used it for my web radio and it works great um so let me just switch this on right there we go switch it on there we are so you can see it's nice and colorful but anyway you can see it right you can see that it's working and every now and again now look it um refreshes so at least it all proves that it's all running from this one device I must admit I haven't actually looked to see whether or not there are enough pins on here hello what's who's ringing me now so as I was saying uh before so really interrupted I haven't checked to see where there are enough pins exposed here of all these various sockets for me to run my MP3 decoder little module on here and therefore turn this into a web radio because it's you know very compact isn't it it's quite nice it'd be the ideal thing to do what I also didn't mention is that oh yes I found the stylus that comes with it it's this thing here right so you know you run a sketch on there just to calibrate the coordinates you know left right up and down in the middle and all that and that all works as per it's is nothing different to what I've done before with the web radio and it works very well they also give you this um connector which they call some kind of crow connector I don't know what the real person is the real name I don't know it's a bit like a KF 20 25 10 but I don't know it's latching and they just latch into there the two that aren't of that type of the speaker on there and that one there the power which is standard sort of two pin what do you call these the ones they use on drones I can't remember the name I'll put it on screen uh yeah just be aware though with this sort of pin that the positive and negative are not always the way you think they should be and in fact if you look at some that screen there you can see the positive is expected to be at the top of that socket yeah and yet look at this pin look there's some pre-wire this is a pre-wired header and you can see that the positive is in fact at the bottom that's how I blew up one of my esp32s quite a while ago because I just connected up the battery like this and Kaboom that was the end of that because there's wired backwards basically so you have to literally get a very very very thin and delicate screwdriver and poke it into here and pull those wires out and change them around and then it all works might not happen to the ones you buy or make so yeah it's not not um always going to be the case right that's that now you'll see this just running in the background while I play about because I want to upload another sketch to this now just to test out the speaker well the speaker's socket and I've got this speaker that just happens to have that plug on here oh there we are so I've just happened to have one of these for a future project yes right my door yes remember that my door announcement Chimes and all that so yeah let's see if this actually works okay right now nothing to do with the screen this time but I thought we'd load up a program that does the 8-Bit um DAC you will be able to hear it from here can it count up to 10. I've got to get the actual program running on the Arduino and type in some numbers so if I type in the numbers one two three four five six seven eight nine zero which I've just done and hit enter three four five six seven zero okay so that actually worked a little bit Yeah the quality cannot be considered to be Wi-Fi by any chart no no it's 8-bit let's face it yeah and I'm gonna do a future video with some slightly better quality audio I hope um but until that time at least it shows that just from a single speaker plugged into one of the deck pins in this case it's uh 25 I believe pin 25 or 26 you can use 26 as well that's what the sketch uses on this one um this is called esp32 elecro speak numbers dot Ino so there we are that's one of their one of their examples pity there was a little bit of a coding error in it it picked the wrong DAC pin but if you if you just check the code against the schematic that they also provide then it's pretty obvious what's going on as a as a unit a screen a three and a half inch screen um ili 9488 type plus all this bit on the back and we haven't even looked at the SD card which is always useful to have I know these days we've got um spiffs or rather we've got little FS now built in hardwired into the framework of the esp32 there's no need to add anything it just works out of the box now so you can forget that video I did oh long time ago now well I had to get it working um for my web radio to actually set up a new Partition and all that you don't have to do any of that it just works out of the box so you can have various partitions in the memory on here oh on here um as though it were another well another SD card really okay that's uh that's that let's just have a quick look at the website then to see where all this comes from so this is their web page ellicro's web page and as you can see there um it's currently 18 18.83 hello oh there's a magnifying glass um not on the price though so it's gone down from 26 90 to 1883. I don't know whether that includes taxes or Duty or anything else everything I buy from China these days incurs vat that's collected on behalf of the UK government we think um so it puts the price up by 27 this is a real real bummer I mean it's stopped me buying so much but anyway um you can also have it with an acrylic case for an extra 1.80 and in some ways I haven't got one but I'd I wish I had now because if I scroll down there's there's the case slot that goes on it another sort of protects the screen lets you hold the thing properly while you're using it which is a bit of a pain otherwise so yeah spend the extra dollar 80 and um there we are spend the extra dollar so it comes to 2063 now and I think it looks quite nice um lots of pictures on here now if I scroll further down on this page you'll see that there's a whole wealth of information in a couple of videos and this and that and the other I'm right down the bottom this here it talks about um lvgl and all the rest of it and the fact you can coded micro python if you want to no I don't want to there's various instructions I think we've been through these this is all to do with lvgl which I could never get to work so that might need a little bit of polishing from Allegro to get that working for Adobe night so we're just starting out but there's a good few pictures here look on you know what all the things on the back of the board are doing uh what else does it show yeah the comparison between the various screens the more ones bang in the middle there 3.5 inches which is you know a good size yeah but all like to run a seven inch but you know it's it's pretty huge isn't it I mean you've got to fit it in somewhere anyways mine's the 35 3.5 inch works fine just be careful of the um the drivers look they do change between sizes you've got a 93 41 there 94.88 nv3047 no I don't know I've never heard of that one but anyway all various different ones right so it's a good comparison there but what it does and if we go even further down the page these are all the links to um well there's the schematic that I should have looked at really first it's in um well it's an eagle format Eagle but I imported it into my CAD program no problem at all data sheets programs the whole if you're interested in this if you think yeah I want one of these screens with or without the esp32 but especially with the esp32 then this is your source of knowledge just be prepared to how can I put this be prepared to put some time in to look at all the options because if you just take the sample programs like I just took that one for counting for example they got the deck pin run this the comment says oh we use one of the DAC pins we'll use DAC pin 25 and it was silence and I thought really are you really using DAC pin 25 I had a look at the schematic and it says no I'm using DAC pin 26. let me let me show you the um schematic just so you know I'm not making this up so this is the schematic diagram of the entire thing and as you can see it's far too small but of course you can you can zoom right in as big as you want um all CAD programs let you do that but down here in the left there's the speak bit this is all to do with the DAC then so if I zoom in on that there's the there's the speaker symbol over on the right of the socket I should say and if we scroll right it says io26 speak not io25 like it says in the program so yeah just be prepared to um well work around a few things and it all all just works as you as you heard works great but the documentation is rough around the edges so elecrow there's one thing I've got to say that needs to be improved for beginners it needs to just work out of the box right okay I think that's enough about this particular product that'll say ellicro did say look are you interested in showing your viewers just take this one and do what you will there which I've done and I certainly hope um to progress this and see if I can put my M3 to MP3 decoder module you know plug it in somewhere just to get it working properly for a web radio I don't know if that's possible and with the amount of other work I've got on at the moment it'll probably be Christmas time before I get around it and I'm not saying which year but I think this is a this is a nice board it all seems to be very solidly built and as I say there's there's you know it's good for beginners all these sockets and stuff I think that's nice and it's got just about every single function you want there couple of things about the board I don't like um one is you do have to press reset and the boot and then let go of the reset every time you upload a program and then this is certainly from Visual Studio code a platform i o when the code is uploaded and it says I'm now doing a hard reset which would then start the program normally it doesn't you have to actually press the reset button again so that isn't working I don't know why a bit annoying so I mean all my boards I just put a small capacitor on the reset button and it works but on here I wondered if there one was a bit dodgy so I took it off it's that one down there just above my thumb I took it off and put a a different one on there made absolutely no difference whatsoever so I don't know what's going on there now the other thing is although they do Supply that little case which is great anything you plug into these sockets of course will stick out at the edge of the case I'm thinking these sockets maybe should have been put in much further inside yeah well away from the edge so you could plug something in and have the cable coming out so that the case could be the same size then as this board really tight now of course yeah I know now I've got a 3D printer I can make a case that fitted this screen exactly yeah to within the millimeter and the last thing I'd want is then to have these sockets on the edge for cables to be scrunched into because they wouldn't fit basically that sample one for example imagine that plugged into there well let's let's do it and have a look so that's plugged into there like that now you can see how much extra room that takes so I'm just saying for compactness I think it would have been a better design to have these sockets further in on the board but I'm just saying if you were making a board um you might want to do that having said that the board I made for my demo which is not gonna have not gonna enough time to talk about now I put all these sockets on but they're vertical you see so that if there was a screen this side at least they wouldn't impact on the overall size of the board but there we are it's just just personal preference I think really loads of documentation as I say and I think the price is probably quite um quite good even allowing for that horrible tax that the Chinese companies seem to Levy now on all UK citizens I've no idea what they do to the states people I mean they have sales tax in Most states do you not in the states so do they add the sales tax on or perhaps you just don't get charged tax from stuff from China which would be great that's how it used to be in the UK until I think it was 2021 or 2022 and then they put it back on so there we are okay that'll do us for now now if you've got any questions about this I'm obviously going to put loads of information in the video description below and in my GitHub like for example which pins are being used to drive that screen you know I had to go back to elecro and say I can't get this to work which pins are using and then they showed me a snapshot of the schematic at which point I went oh duh I should have looked at the schematic myself which I did and followed it up and it's all fine but I'm going to put all that information down there so that hopefully you'll be able to go to my GitHub so let's assume you've bought one of these right you go to my GitHub download one of the zip files and go right just run and it will it will just work out the box you know like that speech one corrected now there was a couple of issues with the with the code um deleting an object without a virtual Destructor for example I don't know it sounds complicated you you can't do that sort of thing well at least the visual studio code will not allow you to do that sort of thing it gives you a warning which it treats as an error but even if you ignored it chances are your code is going to blow up so there's a few little things there I've corrected all those and I'll put I don't know two maybe three examples there and then you can play with it and try them out but yeah I like it I like it overall probably aimed at the sort of middle tier Enthusiast rather than the absolute beginner as it stands but I think Ellie Crow could make this for the absolute beginner if they got that documentation and hand holding correct right from the start that's just my personal opinion okay we're all done dusted now remember if you want to say something to me put it in the comments below yeah because I do reply to your comments I'll read them all if you like this video you think yeah that's okay I'll enjoyed that give it a thumbs up yeah because I want to hear that hey yep the yay yeah and if you like these sort of General videos which I know are getting fewer and fewer these days because I'm overwhelmed with other work you've got to subscribe and John at the back what else you gotta do correct you've gotta ring that Bell because if you don't ring the bell you don't hear when other videos are released I know it's crazy isn't it crazy but there we are that's the way it is okay and I'll see you in the next video I hope you're finding these videos useful and interesting there are plenty more videos to choose and a couple are shown below and if you'd like to subscribe to this channel just click on my picture below and enjoy the rest of the videos thanks for watching

Channel: Ralph S Bacon

Views: 31,130

Keywords: Arduino, Beginners, electronics, C++, microcontrollers, programming, gadgets, ardiuno

Id: EMpF5-0YeSM

Length: 26min 42sec (1602 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 28 2023